The Mysterious Power of 'Hotline Bling'

"Hotline Bling" was supposed to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart this week. Chart-watchers have been waiting ages for Drake to achieve his first pop No. 1 as a solo artist, and he himself was confident enough to issue an anticipatory statement on Instagram last week. Topping the Hot 100, he wrote, would be "the biggest moment of my career to date (in my mind) and if you are looking for me on that particular evening I will be passed out in the water slide that connects to our pool."

Sadly for industry prognosticators, Drake, and the vast #drakehive that wanted their idol to hit this landmark during his heavily symbolic birthday month, he was defeated, Frankenstein-like, by his own creation: moody Torontonian R&B drug fiend the Weeknd, whose powerhouse single "The Hills" just got a boost from a completely unnecessary remix featuring Eminem and Nicki Minaj. As far as losses go, it's not too heartbreaking, considering "Hotline Bling" is still No. 1 on six of Billboard's other charts.

For as much as music snobs complain about pop audiences having bland, formulaic tastes, every once in a while the people raise up something utterly bizarre.

That "Hotline Bling" has gotten this far, though, is remarkable. For starters, Drake released it on SoundCloud back in July during his spat with Meek Mill, alongside the diss track "Back to Back." At first, "Hotline Bling" felt like a throwaway—a goofy B-side to the hardest song in the Drake oeuvre, built on a uniquely un-hard beat that was initially thought to be a reworking of Virginia rapper D.R.A.M.'s eccentric single "Cha Cha," which itself is built off a piece of the soundtrack to Super Mario World. (D.R.A.M. hasn't been happyabout this.)

It also happens to find Drake lyrically exemplifying the worst aspects of his "Charged Up" phase, which finds him bulking up, picking fights with battle rappers, and paving over the plentiful soft spots in his persona that attracted many of his listeners in the first place. Some of Drake's biggest fans have been feeling pretty over him lately, and hearing him try to pass off callous obsession as romantic infatuation, slut-shame a girl for wanting to go out with her friends, and feverishly fantasize about her fucking other men like John Cusack in High Fidelity is just gross and tiring.

Or at least it should have been. But there's something about this weird, dumb, stalker-y song that's resonated more deeply with people than any of his work since "Started From the Bottom." Artists as varied as Jadakiss, Erykah Badu, and Sam Smith have all released versions, and yet there's an entire section of Twitter devoted to people working out what it means to love a song that's so unabashedly problematic. And now there's serious talk about it becoming a No. 1 hit.

People can be unpredictable. For as much as music snobs like to complain about mainstream pop audiences having bland, formulaic tastes easily gamed by the producers of bland, formulaic records, every once in a while the people raise up something utterly bizarre. Three years ago they turned a Korean-language critique of conspicuous consumption into the biggest song in the world. Now they've latched on to a song about sexual desperation set to what sounds like the cha-cha preset on a Casio keyboard, which now comes with a video that consists largely of a world-famous rapper very poorly imitating Bollywood dance moves. Who could have guessed?

Probably not the label A&R people in charge of selecting singles, or the radio programmers who determine what gets played on the radio. "Hotline Bling" doesn't sound like any other big hits, or really anything else in heavy rotation on the radio, and it only started getting spins after it had racked up a ridiculous number of plays on SoundCloud. The smart money would have been on "Back to Back," which fits the definitions of a rap song much more snugly than "Hotline Bling"—not to mention has all the benefits of being born of a dramatic celebrity feud.

Currently "Back to Back" is chilling down at No. 38; for some reason, people gravitated to "Hotline Bling" instead. Maybe it was the hook. Maybe it was the vaguely illicit thrill of hearing someone with such a curated aura of cool going off-brand for a song. Maybe there's just an intensely underserved market for dinky cha-cha beats. Whatever it was, it was a hit well before the music industry realized it was a hit. Right now, listeners have more power to determine songs' fates than they've ever had. Handing them the wheel is already making the pop charts a more interesting place than anyone predicted.